Keeping Up With the Bushes

The spokesman for the State Democratic Party, Blake Zeff, confirmed to me that they’re rolling out a nascent field program called “Neighborhood Network,” under which volunteers around the state focus on bringing around their own communities in a kind of neighbor-to-neighbor, Amway-style political marketing most recently associated with, say, the Bush campaign in Ohio.

So far, the volunteers are on the phone to Democrats in their areas, asking about their concerns. But asking people to convince their neighbors is the new-new-thing in political organizing, after the whole college-kid-with-PDA thing didn’t work out so well for the Democrats in 2004.

Running the program is a longtime organizer named Kenny Diggs, who ran the field operations for the labor-backed Voices for Working Families.